Tuesday, January 31, 2006

I know there are certain things you are not supposed to say, let alone think, but if blogs are good for anything, they are a good place to air the unsayable and unthinkable. Much bloviation about Hamas concerns the fact that it targets civilians, a fact that apparently puts it beyond the pale. Some have pointed out that it hardly lies in the mouths of Israel or the United States to complain about the targeting of civilians. Israel has targeted far more civilians than Hamas, and the United States is the current undisputed world champion in targeting civilians. Hypocrisy is the playground of the powerful.

There is a big relevant difference between Israel and the United States, on the one hand, and Hamas, on the other. Hamas is fighting a war of national liberation against an illegal and immoral occupation. Israel and the United States are each involved on the other side, the side of the oppressive occupiers. Hamas has limited resources to resist the oppression, while Israel and the United States have unlimited resources to oppress. No one is allowed to mention it, but Hamas possibly - I would say probably - has a right under international law to target civilians if that is the only weapon it has to resist the occupation. International law is mostly how the international community reacts. There are and have been many respected world leaders, including many from Israel (although it is highly debatable whether the creation of Israel was a war of national liberation), who spent their younger days targeting, and killing, civilians (e. g., Menachem Begin). As long as you win the war of liberation, the international community seems completely accepting of the concept of targeting civilians. Of course, we're not supposed to mention this, as it doesn't sound very nice.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Frank Lindh, father of John Walker Lindh, does an excellent job of telling his son's story. John Walker Lindh is now serving twenty years for being:

the poster boy for Bush's war on terror; and

an American eye-witness who could tell of how the United States allowed its ally, Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, to commit war crimes, and in fact participated, through American Special Forces, in the illegal slaughter of a group of Afghan prisoners.

The way that Lindh was tortured and railroaded is just another piece of evidence of wrongdoing by the Bush Administration. They can't let him out of jail as they can't let him tell what he knows.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

MI5 has spent months investigating the July 7 London bombing, and has not been able to find any connection between the bombers and Islamic terrorism. No big surprise, considering that they were almost certainly tricked into thinking they were drug mules, and had no intention of blowing up anything (drug dealing payswell). I am a bit surprised that MI5 hasn't been able to make up a story by now. Could the leaking of this MI5 report be an indication that there is some dissent in the British ruling class to framing the incident on Islamic terrorism?

William Engdahl has another interesting article (or here or here), this time on the geopolitical risks of an attack on Iran. I still see absolutely no reason to fear an attack on Iran from either the United States or Israel. The talk is justtalk, intended to manipulate various people in various ways.

One striking thing about all the talk is that we are left with the impression that Iran has done something wrong. There has never been any proof tendered that Iran has done anything it is not entitled to do. It continues to be in strict compliance with its obligations under international law. All the toing and froing just concerns how much extra it gives the international community in terms of access. The only country in the Middle East that is in breach of its international obligations concerning a nuclear program is Israel, and Israel is spectacularly (or here or here) in breach.

The latest idea is that the American threats have to do withstoppingthe Iranian oil bourse in order to protect the position of the American dollar as the pricing currency for oil. This parallels the thought that the attack on Iraq was in part because Iraq had indicated an intention to start pricing oil in Euros. I wonder about this. At the time of the attack on Iraq, Greenspan was Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He was Mr. High Dollar, and the American plan was to build its prosperity on a continuation of the high dollar program. Greenspan's personal reputation was built on the high dollar. The result was a disastrous trade deficit. The job of the new guy, Ben Bernanke, is to slowly push the dollar down in an orderly way in order to begin to fix the deficit problem. This isn't an optional move. If something isn't done soon, the United States will be insolvent. The Iranian oil bourse may actually be welcomed by American strategists as another excuse to give the American people as programs to lower the value of the American dollar take effect. "It's not our fault, it's the oil bourse."

What did people think was going to happen to Hamas? As long as there is an Israeli occupation, Hamas is going to be around. It isn't going to magically disappear. It could be around as an armed resistance movement, or it could be around as part of a formal political process. All resistance movements at some point have to make that transition, and surely it is better to make it sooner rather than later. As the expression goes, it's better to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in. They've had a bit of a free ride up until now, allowing the Palestinian Authority to make all the difficult decisions while they sat back and posed as heroes. Now that they have to take responsibility for making difficult - some would say impossible - political decisions, they will lose some of their halo, and become just another political party. All this is part of the normalization of politics in the Palestine. As a bonus, the election of Hamas will finally put pressure on the Palestinian Authority to reform its own corruption. Isn't it the Americans who are always telling us about the virtues of competition?

Needless to say, Israel and the United States have taken this opportunity to assert once again that they don't intend to negotiate with terrorists. As always, Israel has no 'negotiating partner'. This would be a much stronger argument if Olmert, just before the election which he assumed the PA was going to win, hadn't announced, with much fanfare, the continuation of Sharon's unilateral policies in the Occupied Territories. In other words, the election of Hamas has nothing to do with Israeli unilateralism, and Hamas just another Israelamerican excuse to avoid real negotiating. The funny thing about the Olmert speech is that it was universally spun as a concession by Israel to 'give up' land, rather than what it really was, an assertion that he would continue Sharon's policy of unilaterally seizing Palestinian land to which Israel has no legal claim.

Bush is now looking even sillier than usual, with his hollow promises to bring 'democracy' to the Middle East. Israel obviously wanted an excuse to cancel these elections, and the Palestinian Authority would also have been glad for a delay, but Bush's need for another election to make up for the debacle of the results of the Iraqi election meant that the Americans, for once, forced Israel to allow the elections to proceed (although voting in Jerusalem was a joke, and one has to wonder whether the Israelis unintentionally threw the election to Hamas). Bush has now completely revealed his hand by insisting that the election doesn't count unless one particular side wins. Bush's view of democracy is very Humpty Dumpty:

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'

Hamas is being described as a 'terrorist' group by all the media, which is completely misleading. They are an army of national liberation against a brutal and completely illegal Israeli occupation. The Palestinian people are completely entitled under international law to resist the occupation, and Hamas is the military heart of that resistance. Israel has absolutely no right to occupy the land of the Palestinian nation. Who is the real 'terrorist'?

Israel originally supported Hamas as a way to limit the power of Arafat, much like the CIA supported the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950's in order to limit the political power of Nasser. Both these clever moves have backfired. The Muslim Brotherhood now manifests itself as al Qaeda, and Hamas has become one of the most successful national resistance movements in the world. Hamas forced the Israelis out of Gaza, and probably has kept the Palestinian people from being wiped off the map. The fact that Israel is again using the threat of Hamas as a way to avoid negotiating is irrelevant, as Israel would find any excuse to avoid negotiating. The resistance will continue until Israel does the only possible thing it can do, which is engage in a negotiated settlement acceptable to the Palestinian people leading to a full Palestinian state. The election of Hamas is a step in the right direction.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Here is Paul M. Weyrich, Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation, on the Canadian election. He's a little fuzzy on some of his facts, but confirms there was indeed a conspiracy before the election between Canadian Conservatives and American conservative leaders to mute American conservative gloating about the fact that the Canadian fly was about to fall into the American spider web. Weyrich is good for a laugh (my emphasis in bold throughout):

"My pessimistic friend said that inasmuch as Harper's is a minority government, Harper could do almost nothing to encourage the Country to adopt a more reasonable view of the United States and to correct some premises of Cultural Marxism, which Canadians have espoused, such as same-sex marriage and abortion-on-demand."

and:

"The people of Canada have become so liberal and hedonistic that the public ethic in the Country immediately could not reversed. It will take time. But with leadership it well may be possible to change the public ethic."

and:

"Harper's partisans believe he could maintain power for four years, during which time Conservatives hopefully would witness many vacancies created by Liberals leaving the Courts. The Supreme Court of Canada currently is dominated by Liberals.

As has been the case in the United States, Cultural Marxism largely has been foisted upon Canada by the Courts. If judges who respect the Constitution were to be appointed they would confirm that such rights are not to be found in that document. Sound familiar?"

Friday, January 27, 2006

Now that Hamas has won the Palestinian elections, a good development for peace that is being spun as a bad thing by the Zionists, Bush should do the right thing and invite the leaders of Hamas to Crawford to help him clear some brush (the fat, wheezing guy - I can't find a link yet to his hospitalization for an asthma attack - with the chainsaw will probably be Stephen Harper). Then, to display the famous American balanced approach to the problems of the Middle East, he can invite the leaders of the Jewish settlement movement to come to Crawford to cut down his neighbors' olive trees.

Only 41 per cent of the people who voted Conservative did so because they wanted a Conservative government. Most people just wanted to send a message to the Liberals. Since the Conservatives got 36.25 per cent of the popular vote, that means that all of 14.8625 per cent of voters wanted a government with Conservative policies. That has to be the world-record low amount of support for a political group that claims to have a 'mandate' to impose its policies on the whole country.

The proportional representation assholes are trying to spin this election as a great defeat for democracy, but it actually shows what a potent and fine electoral weapon the 'old-fashioned' first-past-the-post system can be. The Conservatives got 36 per cent of the popular vote and 40 per cent of the seats. The Liberals got 30 per cent of the popular vote and 33 per cent of the seats. The Bloc got 10 per cent of the popular vote and 16.5 per cent of the seats. The NDP got 17.5 per cent of the popular vote and 5.5 per cent of the seats. The results are amazingly fair. The Bloc did proportionately well as they only run in Quebec and have no pretense of forming a national party. They give up real power to be a sort of lobby group (and were punished for it in the election by people who voted Conservative as they correctly felt a Bloc vote was a wasted vote). The NDP always do proportionately poorly as they run a national campaign with policies that are still too left to be mainstream. The irony is that the NDP under Layton has moved dramatically to the center in order to gain seats, a policy that worked at the expense of selling their soul (they run the risk of finding themselves to the right of the Liberals in many areas), and now have greatly increased seats and greatly diminished power. They used to hold the balance of power and successfully pushed the Liberals around to more left-wing policies; now they have absolutely no power. It's nuances like these that the vote reform people completely misunderstand (and it's imposible to argue with them because they have so many alternatives you can never pin them down). They also completely misunderstand the dynamics of the party system, particularly the dynamics of a party system based primarily on class interests (first-past-the-post forces political compromise and punishes political radicalism). The lefties want to replace first-past-the-post to increase the political power of the radical left; right-wingers want to destroy first-past-the-post to increase corporate dominance over people's lives. The result of the tinkering will be less control in the hands of normal people, and more power in the hands of various radical groups and corporations.

You can see how powerful the system actually is when you consider how the results turned out. The electorate wanted to teach the Liberals a lesson but didn't want any real Conservative power. So they kicked out the Liberals while maintaining most of their political base, and gave the Conservatives the slimmest possible minority, facing three parties who are mostly opposed to their policies. They refused to vote for the worst of the Liberals, people like Anne McLellan, Tony Valeri, Pierre Pettigrew, Ms. Digital Rights Management Sam Bulte and slimy lobbyist RichardMahoney. In other words they sent an amazingly finely-tuned message against right-wingers, Canadian neo-colonialism in Haiti, and the culture of corporate lobbying entitlement that followed Paul Martin around. Canadians have been voting for a long time, and can play their electoral system like a violin. If this election had been held in Europe, the group of back-room weasels who controlled 51 per cent of power would become the group of back-room weasels who control 49 per cent of power, and no message would ever be sent. The fact that your party can be wiped off the map completely in an election, and that you could lose your own seat forever, concentrates the mind wonderfully.

The Green Party lost votes in this election. The Canadian Green Party is a group of e-x-t-r-e-m-e right-wingers - too right-wing even for the Conservatives - who mounted a hostile take-over of the old real Green Party. People are no longer being fooled.

There are three large cities in Canada, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. As Canada is one of the most urbanized countries in the world - it surprises people to find that Canadians don't all live in igloos in the arctic - these cities have a disproportionate influence over the country, and a lot of political power. How many seats do you think the Conservatives won in these three cities? Zero. I called the Conservatives the Republican Party North, but they might just as well be called the Hillbilly Party of Canada. You can see where their votes come from if you walk through any small Canadian town. Half the population looks like they are members of a biker gang (and probably are), and the other half looks like they were kicked out of the biker gang for being insufficiently well groomed. This is the 'base' of the Conservative Party. Canadians can no longer feel moral and intellectual superiority over Americans voting for Republicans.

"A political party, in order to be viable, is one that professes peace, in my judgment, in order that it will keep the peace."

So much for the Republican Party. He goes on:

"And so you're getting a sense of how I'm going to deal with Hamas if they end up in positions of responsibility. And the answer is: Not until you renounce your desire to destroy Israel will we deal with you."

This seems to be a common response to the seinfinnization of Hamas. Hamas' official platform nolonger calls for the destruction of Israel. I know it's difficult, but Bush should really try to keep up with the news. Letting this type of organization in the political door is always a good idea, as is talking to their leaders.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

The Conservatives won a minority government, with the Liberals as the Opposition. The Liberals were not wiped off the map, as many Conservative supporters in the media were claiming would happen. The socialist NDP party improved its seat count radically, but paradoxically now has less power than it had before the election (which it precipitated). The separatist Bloc Quebecois did not do nearly as well as it had hoped, and was blindsided by unexpected Conservative strength in Quebec.

The media conspiracy to use the poll results to manipulate the election worked like a charm. The sudden rise in the Conservative poll numbers occurred so late that nobody was ready to counter the threat, and the massaged numbers made a vote for the Conservatives seem like a reasonable, rather than an odd and scary, choice. I've never seen the media so uniformly in favor of one party, and they accepted the daily list of Conservative campaign promises, which consisted mainly of offers to give out money to various groups, without even the slightest question of wider policy issues, including how the country was going to pay for the promises.

The new Prime Minister of Canada is Stephen Harper. I can say, without fear of any reasonable contradiction, that Harper is the single worst human being to ever be Prime Minister of Canada. The best thing the disgusting Canadian media was able to say about him - and they were desperately looking for nice things to say - was that he doesn't suffer fools gladly. His disdain for humanity is quite obvious. He has been a life-long political policy wonk, and his biggest job prior to entering politics as a candidate was President of the National Citizens' Coalition (note the url), an extreme right-wing lobby group which was originally founded by insurance companies to destroy the Canadian health care system. Harper's entire life has been dedicated to two goals: increasing the amount of corporate control over politics and wrecking the single-payer Canadian health care system. He's a real nasty piece of shit, and the disgusting Canadian media won't be able to hide that fact for very long. His Conservative Party has nothing to do with the policies of the old Progressive Conservative Party, and is expressly modeled on the American Republicans.

Harper is somewhat constrained by only having a minority government, but he will pull Canada out of the Kyoto Agreement (to satisfy his Alberta energy company pals), will certainly send Canadian troops into whatever the next disaster of a war George Bush intends to wage, will throw Canada fully behind Bush's space war programs, will end the national child-care system finally funded and negotiated by the Liberals (replacing it by small grants which will be useless as there won't be any child-care spots on which to spend the grants - typical useless conservative vouchering), will completely destroy the Liberal's successful efforts to reach out to Aboriginals, and will find a way to raise all the social issues that Canada has managed to get over (abortion, death penalty, gun control, gay marriage, and any other hateful and divisive things his Christian supporters can find in their stony little hearts). The Conservatives will almost certainly also find a way to make immigration, which has simply not been a real issue in Canadian politics, into a problem. Finally, they will wreck the Canadian government's financial prudence, and throw the country back into deficits (the general conservative plan around the world seems to be to be so financially imprudent that the party that has to clean up the mess will have to do so by cutting social programs, which is just what the Liberals in Canada did to clean up the mess left by the last Conservative government).

The Liberals ran an awful campaign. Liberal leader Martin, who is sixty-eight, appeared to by eighty-six, and the whole party seemed to be intellectually exhausted. The general theory of Canadian voters seems to be that the Liberals are the best party to run the government - it's jocularly called the 'Natural Governing Party' and has clearly been the most electorally successful party in the Western world - but that it needs to be thrown out every ten or fifteen years to keep it from being too 'arrogant'. Martin conspired his whole life to become Prime Minister without ever appearing to have an idea of what he wanted to do. He surrounded himself with an unseemly bunch of ruthless corporate lobbyists, PR spinners and the right-wing edge of the usually very centrist Liberal Party, and was unwilling or unable to shake these people as their malign influence pulled him down.

The Conservatives did a remarkable job, assisted again by the disgusting Canadian media, of having absolutely all their announcements come out of Harper's office. In their last election, some of their crazier social conservatives opened their mouths and spilled the truth of what they intended to do. This time, they had a complete wall of silence. Towards the end of the campaign, they even sent word to their American conservative brothers not to gloat about the upcoming Canadian election result, for fear of alerting Canadians that they were falling into a trap.

The Conservatives have nothing in common with any of the other three parties, except for one very unfortunate thing. They share with the separatists a desire to break up the country. The equation of the survival of the government will be a constant series of devolutions of power from the federal government to the provinces. Since the provinces already have far too much power, this will be a bad thing, and could lead to the complete destruction of the country. I believe that the primary goal of these Conservatives is the destruction of Canadian unity so they can turn over Canadian assets - energy and water - to their American masters. Harper's Americanisms such as ending speeches, in an obvious nod to Bush, by saying 'God Bless Canada', are decidedly creepy in a Canadian political context, and he won't realize the trouble he'll get into in Canada when he gets his obligatory visit, one which Martin was never offered, down to Crawford. If you get in a car and drive along the lakes and the St. Lawrence River in Ontario from Windsor to Cornwall, you'll pass a lot of graveyards filled with dead Canadians, all killed by invading American armies. Canadians haven't quite forgotten that Canada was the first Iraq.

All is not bleak. Martin and his right-wingers needed to be cleaned out, and the Liberals restored to a more centrist party. Some awful Liberals - Anne McLellan, Tony Valeri, SamBulte, and, in a wonderful development, Pierre Pettigrew, the globalist nut behind the Haiti coup - were defeated. The Conservative minority is about as thin as it can be, meaning that much of their worst ideas will not be enacted. While they will do irreparable damage, they will only be in power for a year or two before the next election. With the advantages of a tired Liberal Party beset by scandals, and the absolute support of the disgusting Canadian media (by the way, despite what they might tell you, bloggers had zero effect on this election), the Conservatives managed the support of not much more than a third of the voters. Non-reactionary parties - and changes in the Liberal Party should lead to it becoming more progressive as the lobbyists and failed right-wingers get cleaned out - got almost two-thirds of the votes. Canada is not a conservative country, and the Conservatives have no 'mandate'.

Why do people vote dumb? Canada has always been the luckiest country in the world. Why would people vote to wreck that? I think it is the fork-in-the-eye theory. The Liberals are the most boring group of prudent managers you would not want to meet. Careful government is tedious as hell. Ninety-five percent of people who voted Conservative will be worse off because of the choice, but a fork in the eye sure ends the boredom. Canadians want to live in 'interesting times', and are about to get what they want.

Finally, this election proved again the advantages of a first-past-the-post electoral system. No mathematical formulas, no votes which may lead to the opposite result of what you intended, no backroom lists. If you want to change the government, you vote the bastards out. It's so simple and profound, and such a real exercise of democratic choice by voters, that the elites are dying to change it into some abortion of a system devised by mentally-ill political scientists engineered to remove any hint of uncertainty and real choice.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Canada holds its thirty-ninth national election today. The conspiracy angle is the way the disgusting Canadian media conspired to misuse polling data to give the radical right-wing Conservative Party - which really should be called the Republican Party North - an electoral advantage. The problem the Conservatives have is that many feel - quite accurately, I might add - that they are too extremist and out of line with Canadian values to constitute an acceptable political choice. Manipulated reports of polling data have been systematically used to get around this problem. From late December to early January the polls miraculously turned around, to put the Conservatives, who had been trailing, substantially in the lead. Suddenly, a vote for the Conservatives, which seemed to be a crazy choice, was validated by the fact that so many other Canadians apparently thought it was an acceptable choice (it's so bizarre that the Conservative leader actually argues that a vote for him is safe as he'll only end up with a minority government, meaning he won't be able to do all the things he otherwise would be able to do!). Careful analysis of the polling results shows how the results were distorted in order to create a self-fulfilling prophesy. All of the major polling companies but - perhaps - one, are run by doctrinaire Conservatives, a fact the disgusting Canadian media never bothered to mention, and they all used the same misleading tricks. The media immediately fell all over itself declaring that a Conservative victory was inevitable. The worst thing is that they tried to fool Canadians using the same methods in the last election. It didn't work then but it may work now.

On May 5, 1979, Raymond Lee Harvey wasarrestedby the Secret Service while he awaited the arrival of Jimmy Carter at a Cinco de Mayo Mexican festival at the Los Angeles Civic Center Mall. Shortly thereafter, they arrested Osvaldo Espinoza Ortiz, who had been standing nearby. Raymond Lee Harvey had been carrying a revolver and blank cartridges. His story, later confirmed by Osvaldo Espinoza Ortiz, was that they had been part of a plot involving two Mexican men who had been staying at the nearby Alan Hotel, and who were going to shoot Carter. Shooting the blanks was supposed to create a distraction for the real assassins. When police checked the hotel they found an empty shotgun case and three rounds of live ammunition in a room rented by a Mexican man who had checked out on the day of Carter's visit.

Although the authorities had what appears to be a confession backed up by some hard evidence at the hotel, charges were apparently dismissed on the basis of insufficient evidence. 'Raymond Lee Harvey' plus 'Osvaldo Espinoza Ortiz' equals 'Lee Harvey Osvaldo', which is close enough to send Carter a message. He appears to have received the message:

On July 3, 1979, he signed a directive authorizing secretaid to Islamic opponents of the government in Afghanistan. This eventually led to the war in Afghanistan in which Islamic insurgents from Saudi Arabia managed to defeat the Soviets. Bin Laden rose to prominence in this war, and the basis of al Qaeda was established.

On July 15, 1979, Carter gave his famous 'malaise'speech which was used by the Republicans to defeat him.

After months of resistance, on October 20, 1979 Carter gave in to much pressure (going back to April 1979), particularly from Kissinger, and allowed the Shah of Iran into the United States for medical treatment. Coupled with the inexplicable failure to evacuate the American embassy in Tehran, this decision led directly to the hostage crisis.

We have to wonder how many of Carter's bad decisions, all of which had major consequences benefiting the extreme right in American politics and which continue to resonate in American politics today, were made as a result of the implied threat made by 'Lee Harvey Osvaldo', who, we have to assume based on the fact that nothing appears to have been done about the matter, was working for some official agency of the American government.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Larry Franklin has been sentenced to twelve years for his role in the AIPAC spy scandal. Since the Zionists have assured us that there is no AIPAC spy scandal, and it is just anti-Semitism, you have to wonder what the twelve years are for. The kicker is that he doesn't have to report to jail, but gets some time in the great outdoors to consider whether he'd like a lower sentence in return for cooperating in nailing AIPAC. If he goes to court and tells Americans what AIPAC has been up to, that will be the end of the 'special relationship' between Israel and the United States. It goes without saying that he can't be allowed to go to court. So what will it be, 'accident' or 'suicide'?

The Ahmad Chalabi of Syria is Farid Ghadry. The general neocon/Zionist modus operandi is to set up a sort of government in exile to help to undermine the governments of the countries that the Zionists intend the United States to attack. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were set up by a the Republican spinner John Rendon:

"Thomas Twetten, the CIA's former deputy of operations, credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. 'The INC was clueless,' he once observed. 'They needed a lot of help and didn't know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought in.' Acting as the group's senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama, his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with someone chosen by the CIA. 'The reason they got the contract was because of what they had done in Panama - so they were known,' recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA's station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the agency's successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington's neoconservatives."

and:

"The key element of Rendon's INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a 'management fee' of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.

Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow. 'The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these days,' notes Bruner. 'Their contracts are much more with the Defense Department.'"

As Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress were to Iraq, Farid Ghadry and the Reform Party of Syria are to Syria. But who is the PR man behind Ghadry and the Reform Party of Syria? Trish Schuh wrote, way back in November, before much of the shit had hit the fan (see also here):

"Reform Party of Syria's Farid Ghadry has been a featured speaker at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and is himself a member of AIPAC. When repeated calls to his organization went unanswered, I visited the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the RFP. Reform Party of Syria is the office of 'super-Zionist' lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Middle Gate Ventures, Abramoff's 'political advisory company' partners with RFP."

The Reform Party of Syria completely denies any involvement with Abramoff (my emphasis in bold):

"Quotes in some anti-democracy Syrian press and American pro-Ba'athist blogs have surfaced that the Reform Party of Syria rents space at the offices of Middle Gate Ventures associated with Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist accused of fraud and illegal contributions to the US Congress.

RPS denies any involvement with Jack Abramoff or the fact that we have a presence in his office. RPS heard of Abramoff the same time that everyone did and from the mainstream media.

Our offices are located at the Mills Building on 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue and we rent them from a company called OfficEscape (www.officescape.com), which runs shared offices around the country."

In response to this denial, Trish Schuh followed up on the matter, and writes to Joshua Landis (scroll down; my emphasis in bold):

"I am the original author of the comment/article on Syria that Mr. Farid Ghadry denied (concerning his relationship w/ Jack Abramoff).

As per Reform Party of Syria not using 'shared office space' with Jack Abramoff: I personally checked with different sources - including the building maintenance crew on duty concerning the RPS, because RPS is not listed in the building's lobby directory - and none of the staff knew of it and the doorman claimed they'd never gotten mail under that name. Nor did the receptionist/secretary on duty know of the RPS. This is not how a legitimate organization usually runs.

I returned to Abramoff's office (2 or 3 times total) and finally insisted they look through Abramoff's client roster. Then the secretary on duty at 'Middle Gate Ventures' found RPS listed in her files. She even gave me RPS's number to call - which accurately matched the number on the official RPS website.

I then requested to speak to a supervisor who could give an RPS statement on the 'latest' in Lebanon. The supervisor declined, saying she didn't know and that they were not authorized to speak to the press."

If they had never heard of Abramoff, the Reform Party of Syria might want to explain what their name is doing in a file in Abramoff's office, and why they appear to have no presence in the building in which they are supposedly located other than in Jack Abramoff's filing cabinet. Unless they can come up with a reasonable explanation, I'd say they were busted. Abramoff connects directly to extreme right-wing Zionists, which is where we should be looking when we see the bizarre and otherwise inexplicable attempts by the United States to cause 'regime change' in Syria.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Norman Finklestein writes about the economic boycott of Israel (found via jews sans frontieres, which has links to some boycott sites):

"Apart from the sheer magnitude of its human rights violations, the uniqueness of Israeli policies merits notice. 'Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality,' B'Tselem has concluded. 'This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa.' If singling out South Africa for an international economic boycott was defensible, it would seem equally defensible to single out Israel's occupation, which uniquely resembles the apartheid regime."

and:

"The moral burden to avert the impending catastrophe must now be borne by individual states that are prepared to respect their obligations under international law and by individual men and women of conscience. In a courageous initiative American-based Human Rights Watch recently called on the U.S. government to reduce significantly its financial aid to Israel until Israel terminates its illegal policies in the West Bank. An economic boycott would seem to be an equally judicious undertaking. A nonviolent tactic the purpose of which is to achieve a just and lasting settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Indeed, the real enemies of Jews are those who cheapen the memory of Jewish suffering by equating principled opposition to Israel's illegal and immoral policies with anti-Semitism."

The strange relationship between the United States and Israel probably reached its strangest point when Condi Ricethreatened American ally - NATO member and a country that, although not formally part of the American attack, put troops at harm's way in Iraq, leading to threats from al Qaeda - Norway with unspecified mayhem for the musings from one Norwegian politician about supporting international law by boycotting Israel. This led to an unfortunate (and rather craven) retreat for a nation that probably used to think it was a sovereign country that could make its own decisions. This is getting embarrassing for the Americans as well. If one of Israel and the United States is the tail and one is the dog, who is wagging whom? You can get an inkling of how important a boycott would be by the fact that Israel ordered Rice to make a fool of herself and bully an American ally - shades of gunships up the fjords - for even thinking about the idea.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

An inconclusive investigation by Tapio Helen of the real identity of the famous author B. Traven.

According to his wife, Yitzhak Rabin was in Dallas, Texas just hours before the assassination of JFK. He was about to become chief of staff of the IDF, and his tour of U. S. military bases seems to have been some sort of preparation for his new job. He had been in Fort Bliss near Dallas, which is particularly interesting if, as many believe, the Pentagon was behind the assassination. Of course, Rabin would eventually become Prime Minister of Israel and the victim of his own assassination. Given the Israelis filming and cheering as the WTC came down, you have to wonder if the Israelis have season front-row tickets for every American disaster.

If you scroll down a bit, Cryptome makes a possible connection between the NSA and Nick Berg through MCI, which obtained an early contract for cell phone communications for the American government in Iraq. Michael P. Wright is still hard at work on the Berg investigation (see here and the list of articles that follow), particularly Berg's odd connection with Moussaoui in Oklahoma, which is leading him to the possibility that it was a condition of Berg's scholarship at the University of Oklahoma that he fulfill a service requirement which could include intelligence work. Just before he was killed, Berg was at work on cell phone towers at Abu Ghraib.

Via Professor Hex, 'Scholar of the Strange and Mysterious', an account of a bizarre car 'accident' in California which oddly played like a bad horror film.

'101 Peculiarities Surrounding the Death of Vincent Foster' by Richard L. Franklin.

We're beginning to see a subtle but important shift in the Official Story on the death of David Rosenbaum. The chances of one suspect innocently walking into the police station - a place that real bad guys wouldn't get within a mile of - and ending up confessing to murder are infinitesimally small, but the chances of two perps separately walking into the station to end up confessing is completely impossible. Although initial reports are clear that the second guy walked into the station to inquire about the case, the suggestion is now vaguely arising that the second guy was apprehended as a result of information the police received from the first guy. The story is still ridiculous, but not, like the first version, laugh-out-loud ridiculous, so watch for the new subtle change to become part of the Official Story.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

There are apparently still a few stragglers who refuse to accept the fact that the American multi-trillion dollar mistake in Iraq was made under the influence of Israeli agents in the White House (note this uncharacteristically stupid article by Stephen Zunes, containing every straw man in the book, and coming down to the fact that we can't speak the truth now as it sounds too much like untrue anti-Semitic attacks made in the past). Of course there were many other reasons for the attack, and the politics of empire requires that many interest groups have to be serviced when such a major action is taken. No one can argue that the Israeli agents were the only reason for the attack. The Israeli agents were not a sufficient condition for the attack, but they were a necessary condition. The attack would never have occurred but for the actions of those working for Israel.

If you are still not convinced, consider the fact that the Americans are in the middle of using the United Nations and a false concern about the Hariri assassination to plot an attack against Syria (or here). Those who argue against an Israeli cause for the Iraq attack rely on other American possible reasons for wanting regime change in Iraq. What reason can the United States possibly have for attacking Syria?:

Does Syria have weapons of mass destruction? Nope.

Does Syria have a program to build weapons of mass destruction? Nope.

Does Syria have a nuclear program? Nope.

Does Syria have or plan to have nuclear weapons? Nope.

Does Syria pose any possible threat to the United States? Nope.

Does Syria have a strategically important quantity of hydrocarbons? Nope.

Does the United States need Syria as a place to build bases to control the Middle East? Nope.

Does control of Syria give the Americans any strategic benefits whatsoever? Nope.

Was Syria involved with the September 11 attack? Nope.

Is Syria connected to al Qaeda? Nope. In fact, the Syrian government is one of the biggest enemies of Islamist terrorist groups.

Did Syria try to blow up Bush's father? Nope.

All of the many reasons that the Zionists claim are the real reasons the Americans attacked Iraq simply do not apply to Syria. So why are John Bolton and the Americans well on their way to attacking Syria?

The answer is obvious. Israel. In Sharon's last interview (with the Japanese newspaper Nikkei) before he croaked (probably assassinated) he was asked the question "Do you think the Golan Heights will stay under Israeli sovereignty forever?" and answered:

"I don't see any situation where Israel will not be sitting on the Golan Heights. For 19 years the northern part of Israel was under heavy war of attrition. We are not going to return to this situation, although Israel will never attack Syria."

This just repeats Sharon's position on the matter. It is an illegal position under international law, and one that is impossible to maintain unless the Syrian government is replaced by an American puppet. The post-Sharon Likud position calls for 'defensible borders', which includes permanent control of the Golan Heights. The next American war will unquestionably be fought solely for Israeli right-wing interests. Why does it continue to be so hard to accept the real necessary condition for the last American war?

The last attack is past, and the damage it caused can't be fixed, at least not by any possible present or future American government. I'm concerned about the future. Failure to acknowledge the real malign influence of Zionism over the American government is going to doom Syria - and no doubt many other Arabs in the Middle East - to the grim fate of the Iraqis. If you don't cast blame where it is due you are going to be morally responsible for the deaths which are clearly coming, all at the instance of Israel. Failure to acknowledge the truth based on some bad-faith concern about possible anti-Semitism also leaves you intellectually unable to answer some of the mysteries about American politics (it also falls into the Zionist trap of conflating an attack on Zionism with an attack on Jews, forgetting that the real power behind Zionism in the United States is Christian Zionism). Why did the Democrats support the attack on Iraq? Why do they turn down a perfect election issue and refuse - for the most part - to call for withdrawal from Iraq? Why is nobody saying anything about the upcoming holocaust against the Syrian people? There is only one answer for all these questions.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

They've now caught the second guy in connection with the murder of David Rosenbaum. Well, 'caught' isn't quite the right word (my emphasis throughout in bold):

"Police have released the name of a second man charged in the death of New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum.

DC police say Percy Jordan Junior was arrested Friday afternoon, shortly after walking into a police station to inquire about the case. He's charged with felony murder."

This is moving from tragedy to comedy and back to tragedy at a rapid pace. You have to remember the tremendous pressure on the D. C. cops to solve - and solve quickly - the murder of a prominent white man in a white neighborhood. The social ecology of Washington works because it is really two cities, one with a murder rate like Bogota or Baghdad, and the other where Very Important White People live, where murder isn't allowed.

The murder weapon should be an issue. From the New York Times January 13 article:

"The authorities attributed the cause of death to blunt force trauma to his head, neck and body. Detective Paci said that robbery was the motive and that Mr. Hamlin had promised to lead officers to the murder weapon. The weapon was described as a bat or a pole."

"Police have also been faulted for not roping off the crime scene after learning early the next morning that Rosenbaum had been assaulted. They did not secure the scene until just after 11 a.m., friends of the Rosenbaums have said."

It's not like the D. C. cops have never had experience with a murder scene before. Allowing crime scenes to be contaminated is one of the key signs of conspiracy. The intention is to make it impossible to find evidence disproving guilt of the patsies.

Friday, January 13, 2006

From the Washington Postaccount of the 'solving' of the David Rosenbaum assassination (my emphasis throughout in bold):

"A 23-year-old maintenance man from Southeast Washington was arrested last night and charged in the robbery and slaying of New York Times journalist David E. Rosenbaum, police said. They also were seeking one other person.

Michael C. Hamlin was arrested shortly after 6 p.m. when he walked into the 7th District police station in the 2400 block of Alabama Avenue SE, which is in the block where he lives, and asked why 'my face is on TV,' police said."

and:

"Only an hour earlier, police had released to the media images from surveillance videotapes taken at a CVS store in Southeast Washington and an auto parts business in Prince George's County. Police said the tapes showed Hamlin using or attempting to use Rosenbaum's credit cards shortly after Rosenbaum was robbed near his home in Northwest Washington on Jan. 6.

Hamlin walked into the police station last night wearing the same dark jacket, with his first name sewed onto a chest patch, that he had been wearing in a surveillance tape, police said."

and:

"'It did wrap up rather quickly,' Detective Anthony Paci said during a news conference last night outside the violent crimes branch."

and:

"Police said they decided not to cancel the stolen credit cards after the attack so they could track the robbers' whereabouts."

and:

"Surveillance cameras then showed a card being used at 10:39 p.m. Friday at a CVS store in the 2600 block of Naylor Road SE and at 11:01 a.m. Saturday at Advance Auto Parts, in the 6500 block of Kenilworth Avenue in Riverdale. The auto store turned down the card."

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Following up on the recently resurrected thesis that Castro had Kennedy killed:

Respected researcher Anthony Summers weighs in, and doesn't dismiss the idea out of hand. However, he does write:

"William Coleman, a former assistant counsel, had told me before Christmas of a mission that he carried out on the orders of the US Chief Justice, Earl Warren. He had flown to a secret location for a meeting with Señor Castro - a rare event indeed for an American official, even more so given the nature of the discussion. What Mr Coleman learnt, he said, satisfied him - and the Chief Justice when he reported back - that 'Castro's regime had nothing to do with the President's murder'.

Mr Coleman had spoken clearly, and in the presence of a third party. This week, however, I received a letter from him denying that the meeting with the Cuban leader had ever taken place. This is hard to explain, unless perhaps one notes that Mr Coleman - himself a former Cabinet member - is close to senior officials in the Bush Administration. Perhaps the Bush people, who take a hard line on Cuba, prefer that dark rumours about Señor Castro remain unrefuted."

The change in position may indicate that there is some kind of Bush Administration anti-Castro position brewing.

"General Fabian Escalante, one of those investigating the case on the Cuban side, has stated that based on information from the State Security files, certain testimonies and an analysis of the facts and antecedents, Havana has reached conclusions as to the identity of the guilty parties that are similar to those of other investigators: the CIA, the Mafia and Cuban counterrevolutionaries planned and executed the assassination. He added that having studied the descriptions of witnesses to the crime, especially those expounded by former Judge Garrison, it is presumed that the sharpshooters of Cuban origin Eladio del Valle and Hermino Díaz were those ordered to fire, subsequently escaping in a Nash Rambler truck. And that the attempt was organized by two groups, one under the control of Jack Ruby and the other by Frank Sturgis, later chief of the Watergate plumbers.

Among the CIA plotters he also mentioned David Atlee Phillips and Richard Helms, supervisor of anti-Cuban operations; General Cabell, former deputy chief of the CIA; Gerry Hemmings and other high-ranking officials.

The scandal, picked up by the press worldwide, led to the committee instructing the CIA executive to declassify the majority of the documents, which succeeded in hushing the protests. But doing so would have been to incriminate itself."

Castro and Kennedy were starting toattemptarapprochement just before the assassination. It makes no sense for Castro to kill Kennedy to get to LBJ.

Oswald, who is said to have received $6500 for his part in the plot, hardly had 65 cents to rub together. The Castro thesis doesn't make any sense except as more in the long line of anti-Castro propaganda.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

David Rosenbaum, a reporter and editor for the New York Times, died as a result of a head injury allegedly received when he was mugged in his upper-scale neighborhood in Washington. Problems with this:

Knocking someone out and then robbing them is an extremely odd method of mugging. Unconscious victims can't give you their valuables, the mugger wastes an assault on someone who may not even have anything worth taking, the assault makes a big spectacle out of the mugging and is likely to attract people looking to help, the assault means the police are much more motivated to solve the crime, and, if you are caught, the assault means you will be likely to receive a much longer sentence. You risk turning a relatively minor matter into a murder. Muggers generally approach you from the front, show a weapon or claim to have one, and demand that valuables be turned over. It's a tried-and-true approach with a history of success.

Authorities are looking for two suspicious men, seen leaving the area in a car. They have a partial plate on the car. Hit men use cars and travel in pairs. Muggers don't.

There is controversy over the matter as the ambulance arrived very late. Why did it arrive late? The initial responding unit reported it as being less of a priority. Why? They thought he was drunk. Why did they think he was drunk and not the victim of a mugging? Rosenbaum was still obviously wearing his watch and wedding ring. The muggers had time to root around in his pockets for a wallet they couldn't even be sure he had, but left the obvious valuables.

David Rosenbaum was a high-level NYT journalist, not the kind of guy from whom you'd expect to get much real truth (he was no Gary Webb), but had recently (a month ago) retired from the newsroom of an organization that has a lot to hide. Was he hinting that he might reveal some of the secrets behind the odd relationship of the Times to the Bush Administration (holding stories of extreme national importance back for a year, and engaging in discussion of what news is 'fit to print'), or behind the campaign of lies told by the Times to help the Bush Administration trick the American people into the attack on Iraq?

From the 'Conspiracy Theories' section of Aljazeera.com, an article entitled "FBI evidence of Mossad involvement in September 11 attacks on the U.S.?!":

"An article by reporter Jim Galloway, published on The Austin American-Statesman on Nov. 25, 2001, stated that the FBI had evidence suggesting that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence, along with some rogue American and foreign spy agencies, may be deeply involved in or even entirely responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks as well as other acts of terrorism against the United States."

The Galloway article doesn't actually go that far, but is carefully written so you can draw your own conclusions about why the New Jersey moving industry is such an attractive career prospect for recent Israeli military veterans (and you might also wonder why the anthrax attacks were mailed from an area in New Jersey near where an Israeli intelligence unit is allegedly stationed). The Al Jazeera article goes on to discuss the first post-9-11 interview with Osama bin Laden, in which he unambiguously stated:

"I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle."

and:

"The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the U.S. system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive."

and:

"Then there are intelligence agencies in the U.S., which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usama and Taleban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush Administration approved a budget of 40 billion dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance. Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the U.S. secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it is President Bush or any other U.S. President, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks."

Anyone looking at the matter objectively has to reach much the same conclusion as the Al Jazeera article:

"U.S. intelligence analysts believe that Israel benefited most from the September 11 attacks. Israel has been widely criticized by the West for its aggression against the Palestinians. Israeli occupation soldiers were, and still are, shown on international TV news in heated exchanges with Palestinian youths armed with nothing more than stones. Israeli tanks bulldoze Palestinian farms and homes, and human rights groups complain that Palestinian detainees are tortured and abused in Israeli jails.

But after 9/11, things changed dramatically. Sympathy for the Palestinians vanished. The Arabs were universally portrayed as the 'bad guys.'"

The beneficiaries of September 11 were the Bush Administration itself, the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, various intelligence agencies, and Israel. With every day of Bush misrule we learn of more corruption and deception. Is it all that difficult to contemplate that the whole Official Story of 9-11 is just another lie?

Sunday, January 08, 2006

I guess I'm turning into a warblogger or something in suggesting that the Iraq war will cost Americans a trillion dollars. The real cost is between one and two (or here) trillion, or even more. A trillion here, a trillion there, eventually it adds up to real money. You would also have to add in the irreparable cost of the Bush misadventure to the American brand around the world. It has already been calculated that American support for Israel cost Americans over threetrillion dollars from 1973 to 2002 alone. If you add that to the cost of a war that would not have occurred but for the concerted efforts of Israeli agents working within the American government and following an Israeli blueprint, Israel has probably, on a conservative estimate, cost Americans around five trillion dollars. The neocons aren't done yet, as war against Syria is well in the works - another trillion or two - with wars against Saudi Arabia and Egypt - trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars - coming inevitably - and by inevitably, I mean by the grim logic of Zionist colonialism, which won't stop leaching until Greater Israel is completed or the host is bloodless - down the pipe.

There are a couple of things that are amusing about this. There are many people around the world absolutely infuriated by the Israelamerican brutality, and by the immorality of American support for Zionist imperialism. The infuriated can take quite a bit of joy in the knowledge that Americans are going to pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, for the evil that they do. And pay! Just bask in all the free health care, free education, environmental clean-up, and general increase in wellbeing for the average American that have all been thrown away forever just so a few religious nuts can continue their impossible dreams of empire.

The second thing that is amusing is that those who claim that the attack on Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with Israel are going to look increasingly silly as the bills continue to mount. The practical problem with refusing to acknowledge the obvious role of Israel in sending America into war is that you are left completely unable to stop the next war. Preparations for wars which only benefit Israel are already well advanced, but since nobody is prepared to even mention Israel, no one has the available intellectual weapons to address the problem. Frankly, it would be better for apologists for Israel to acknowledge the problem now, rather than wait a few trillion dollars down the road when the noticeable effects on the United States are so great that the anger of the American people cannot be controlled. Failure to acknowledge the cause of the disease when it is curable means the disease progresses. And then you die.

Saturday, January 07, 2006

There is something seriously wrong with at least part of Sibel Edmonds' story as described in Wot Is It Good 4 (point 2):

"as part of her undercover job, she took at least 5 trips to turkey between 1997 and 2001"

I can't say that didn't happen, but it is almost impossible. Nicholas Kristof wrote (as far back as October 2003):

"First, the C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson's name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons.

Second, as Mrs. Wilson rose in the agency, she was already in transition away from undercover work to management, and to liaison roles with other intelligence agencies. So this year, even before she was outed, she was moving away from 'noc' - which means non-official cover, like pretending to be a business executive. After passing as an energy analyst for Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a C.I.A. front company, she was switching to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having 'C.I.A.' stamped on her forehead."

She could very well have been hanging around the ATC in Washington, looking for dirt. Acting as an undercover officer in Turkey between 1997 and 2001? Not likely. Ames was arrested in early 1994, and her overseas undercover life ended then. Since the main part of Edmonds' story - that she essentially walked in off the street as a part-time contract employee and the FBI showed her all its biggest secrets (she should have asked them who killed JFK and MLK!), even after she revealed to the alleged Turkish agents that she did not want to join the ATC - is so inherently implausible that she will need to fix this part of her story before I can even begin to feel comfortable with it. If someone (the CIA?) is coaching her, they ought to fix the script.

The additional idea - and not one that I blame on Sibel Edmonds - that Brewster-Jennings, which appears to have been mere cover (received mail and answered the phone), and not an operating entity, was working in Turkey to prevent the Bush Administration from planting WMD in Iraq, appears to be the highest fantasy. There is a tendency in conspiracy theory to try to solve two mysteries at once. Cattle mutilations and lights in the sky leads to the conclusion that the aliens are conducting experiments. Brewster-Jennings needs an explanation and we still don't know why the Bush Administration didn't plant WMD in Iraq, so why not combine them? Actually, it appears that the reason WMD weren't planted is simply that the Bush Administration believed that WMD would be found. The 'stovepiping' worked, and as we have seen from the machinations of the Office of Special Plans, those who knew there were no WMD were kept separate from those who actually believed what they were told. David Kay marched around Iraq actually believing he was going to find something (the recent Risen revelations show that the Americans were asking Iraqis to show them where the WMD were, which indicates that the Americans still assumed that they existed). The additional planting problem was that Kay's experts would have been easily been able to spot a plant from Turkey, which, since Kay was an honest man, would have been a disaster.

The most intriguing aspect of the Edmonds story may be the connections between the ATC and Feith and Perle. However, Turkey has an on-again, off-again friendship with Israel (depending on how hard Israel is pushing its relationship with the Kurds), so it is not unusual that the ATC might look to Israeli agents to further its American relationships.

Friday, January 06, 2006

A newdocumentary claims that Kennedy was assassinated by agents working for Castro. This isn't a new theory, but is the primordial goo of Kennedy assassination theories, the original story planned by the real conspirators, what PeterDaleScott calls the "phase one" theory. The conspirators appear to have planned to blame the assassination on Cuba and/or the Soviets. They relied on the dodgy story of a man named Gilberto Alvarado, who said that Oswald had been recruited to kill Kennedy inside the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City. They also relied on a recorded telephone conversation from the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City of someone calling himself Oswald - but who they knew wasn't Oswald - talking about having met someone there who was a probable KGB agent. There were enormous intelligence obfuscations about both these matters, indicating that someone had a very guilty purpose. These deceptions left the real conspirators with the post-assassination options of invading Cuba and/or starting a nuclear war with the Soviets (right-wingers were just as crazy then as they are now). When Oswald failed to accommodate them by failing to die 'resisting arrest' in the Texas Theater, and had a while to talk, the "phase one" theory became too dangerous, and they reverted to the "phase two" theory that Oswald was a lone nut. The "phase one" theory lingered, however, and was enough to scare LBJ into convincing Earl Warren to lead the Warren Commission cover-up, thus protecting the real conspirators (the Alfredo story, which was an obvious lie, was retracted just after the formation of the Warren Commission).

The old and completely discredited Cuban theory is being resurrected and promoted now, at a time when the 'dominoes' in Latin America keep falling into the Castro-Chavez sphere of influence, and Bush badly needs a distraction to make it through the end of his term. Are we being slowly prepared for an invasion of Cuba?

Thursday, January 05, 2006

A few paragraphs from the article in the New York Observer by Gabriel Sherman and Sheelah Kolhatkar on James Risen's book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" (my emphasis in bold):

". . . the book raises the question of how much of Mr. Risen's material - about W.M.D., for instance - was in The Times' hands but kept out of print until the arrival of State of War.

The Times' becalmed post–Judy Miller positioning notwithstanding, it's hard to imagine the paper's explanation for its W.M.D. bungle - which was largely attributed to Ms. Miller's bad sources - holding water if reporting from Mr. Risen was coming in at the same time that tended to contradict her accounts.

Certainly, his reporting on W.M.D. as it appears in State of War does just that.

Call him the Anti-Woodward: Though the Washington Post reporter made famous in the Watergate scandal received information about Plamegate, he kept it from his editors. But Mr. Risen, according to several sources at The Times, couldn't get his material into the paper fast enough. It's impossible to tell what material Mr. Risen had on W.M.D. while working the national-security beat in 2002 and 2003. Either way, however, the material he has gathered for this book, while keeping his reporting position at The Times, is some stunning stuff."

and:

"According to Mr. Risen's book, a C.I.A. agent approached a middle-aged woman named Sawsan Alhaddad, an Iraqi-born doctor living in Cleveland who had left Iraq in 1979, with a top-secret mission. The C.I.A. asked her to travel to Baghdad to extract information from her brother, who was believed to be a 'key figure' in Saddam's nuclear-weapons program. Ms. Alhaddad did, and was told in no uncertain terms by her brother that Saddam's nuclear program 'has been dead since 1991.' Later, 'CIA officials ignored the evidence' from Ms. Alhaddad and many family members of other Iraqi weapons scientists who'd been sent on similar missions, Mr. Risen writes. The chapter ends with her brother watching Colin Powell's February 2003 televised presentation to the United Nations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction with shock."

and:

". . . according to current and former Times sources familiar with the Washington bureau, Mr. Risen was gathering reporting from sources in the prewar period that cast a skeptical light on Saddam Hussein's alleged W.M.D. stockpiles, but either couldn't get his stories in the paper or else found them buried on the inside pages."

and, in case you think the Bush Administration really knows what it says it knows about Iran:

"His book ends on a slightly ominous note. In the last chapter, he describes a massive error committed in 2004 by a C.I.A. officer charged with handling communications with the agency's spies in Iran. After a mistaken data transmission, a double agent handed over the names of all the C.I.A.'s operatives in Iran to Iranian security officials, who went and arrested many of them. It left the C.I.A. virtually unable to gather intelligence about nuclear activities in Iran. Mr. Risen describes the incident as an 'espionage disaster' that, 'of course, was not reported in the press.'"

This is just confirmation of what we already knew: as part of a massive Zionist conspiracy involving Israeli agents planted in the Bush Administration, the New York Times published a long series of lies about alleged Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction. The Times, from at least one of its own reporters whose reporting they stifled, knew these stories to be lies, but published them anyway in order to force an illegal and immoral war that is going to cost American taxpayers at least one trillion dollars. Americans should send the Times a bill for that trillion bucks. Why anyone would continue to buy this lying rag is completely beyond me.

For those of you still resisting the thesis that a group of Zionist intellectuals associated with the 'Clean Break' paper prepared for Netanyahu engineered much of the disastrous attack on Iraq - resistance largely based not on the facts, but on a fear that once Americans realize that they were tricked and who tricked them American support for Israel would suddenly end (the timing is right, with Sharon and Abramoff, a man who spent a lot of his ill-gotten money on an Israeli sniper school to train Sharon's murderers of Palestinians, out of the picture at the same time) - here is something to ponder from Newsweek on a special slide for the White House in a Pentagon briefing in 2002 [corrected; thanks to Wilton Weekes] (my emphasis in bold):

"NEWSWEEK has obtained declassified copies of slides made for the briefing. There are three sets: a version for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one for the then CIA Director George Tenet and one shown at a White House session attended by the then deputy national-security adviser Stephen Hadley and Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's chief of staff at the time. The White House materials include a slide, not part of the other briefings, devoted to the alleged Atta meeting. (Rumsfeld and Tenet were told there was 'one indication of Iraqi involvement with Al Qaeda specifically related to 9/11.') The White House slide, dated September 2002, cites publicized allegations from a post-9/11 Czech intel report that Atta met the April before 9/11 with Iraqi spy Ahmed al-Ani, and asserts the United States had 'no other' intel contradicting the report. The slide offers purported details about Atta's activities in Prague (including two earlier, confirmed visits). It says that during one visit al-Ani ordered an Iraqi intelligence officer to 'issue funds to Atta.' The slide also includes previous unpublished allegations that Atta met the Iraqi Embassy charge d'affaires and that 'several workers at Prague airport identified Atta following 9/11 and remember him traveling with his brother Farhan Atta.'"

The Office of Special Plans, led by 'Clean Break' participant Douglas Feith, in effect kept two sets of books, one to show to those who might not be able to swallow its lies, and another to show to the White House. The story of Atta and his brother (?!) was a special edition intended as a talking point for Dick Cheney (and boy, did he keep talking). The fact that we're hearing about this now may mean that Cheney has decided to lighten the load on Air Force One by throwing Feith out the door without a parachute. While many were disappointed at Fitzmas and happy about Abramoffukkah, I'm looking forward to Feithster.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

"A high ranking Syrian official said that Syria's President Bashar al-Assad will not respond to the request made by the chairman of the UN investigation committee into the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, to meet with him."

You can see clearly how this works. The Israelamericans demanded that Syria get out of Lebanon. It did. Then they demanded full cooperation with the Mehlis investigation. Syria gave it. Then they demanded that senior Syrian officials meet with Mehlis. They were sent to meet him (but he couldn't understand what they were saying as everything was fed to him through Lebanese judges!). Now they want to call the President of Syria on the carpet. If he went, they'd just make up another demand. Failing that, John Bolton would say Syrian cooperation didn't count as he didn't say 'Simon says' when he made the demand (due to the international readership of this blog, I wonder if everybody understands this reference to a children's game which no doubt exists in some form in every culture). There is no possible way that Syria can ever comply in an manner that will suit the Israelamericans. The entire Hariri investigation - and since when is the United States interested in investigating a murder of a citizen of one country, Saudi Arabia, which occurred in another country, Lebanon, and has absolutely nothing to do with the United States? - is just a charade intended to obtain U. N. sanction to another breach of international sovereignty through an attack on Syria.

We went through exactly the same progression of demands on Iraq. Saddam complied with every inspection request he got. Nothing was ever good enough. When the inspectors had to get out to flee the coming American 'shock and awe' bombs, the Israelamericans actually had the audacity to claim that they left because Saddam kicked them out! The game is to continue to escalate the demands until the Israelamericans are sure you can't possibly comply, then use the lack of compliance as an excuse for an attack. If you comply anyway, they just lie about it. You can't win.

Monday, January 02, 2006

"My prediction for 2007:John McCain will become the front-runner for Republican White House puppet, vs. Hillary/Lieberman on the D.I.N.O. ticket. We are so screwed."

John McCain is Barry Goldwater. Exactly. The Democrats want to run a candidate who can't or won't get out of a disastrous war. In other words, Hillary is LBJ. A completely corrupt bully with some good intentions. The Republicans will let Hillary blow her brains out on Iraq, just like LBJ did on Vietnam. The 2008 Presidential election will be a reprise of the 1964 Presidential election.

"By paying up without caveat, donors in effect relieve Israel of its obligations under international law. As the occupying power, Israel must deliver assistance and services to the Palestinian population. As high contracting parties to the Geneva conventions, the donors are obliged to ensure Israel's compliance with the law. None of this has happened. Instead, international aid has rendered the occupation cost-free. It has even enriched Israel's economy: according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, for every dollar produced in the occupied territories, 45 cents flows back to Israel."

Israel's recent unilateral decision to control Palestinian use of certain areas of Gaza proves that Israel is still an occupying power over Gaza, despite the well publicized withdrawal. Of course, Israel is still clearly the occupying power over the West Bank. The Israeli 'uniqueness' means that the world doesn't even question the fact that Israel makes absolutely no effort to meet its international law obligations as an occupying power, and in fact constantly strives with its American stooges to eliminate U. N. efforts to provide relief to the Palestinians. Israel even blows up facilities provided by international donors, who simply send more money in with no complaint about the Israeli actions or the fact that a good portion of the reconstruction money will flow directly back into Israel. For Israel, the occupation is even a profit center! Blow up a school paid for by a donor nation with a helicopter and a bomb paid for by American taxpayers, then grab a good portion of the new donor money provided to rebuild the school. What a deal! Rather than face being called anti-Semites, and feeling guilty about the mass poverty in the Palestine, the donor nations do the only thing they can do, which is send more money.

With everybody waging and planning illegal wars of aggression, with American rendition and torture and Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, with Israel's constant scoffing at its obligations under international law including its obligations as an occupying power, you really have to ask: Does international law still exist?